Marcy Petit
Sara Vance Artist in Residence

UNDER THE OWL’S EYE

During her 5-week residency at Wave Pool Gallery, Marcy will create a series of installations and a performance that explore the loss — and the reclaiming — of women’s ancestral ties to nature. Drawing from eco-feminist perspectives, folklore, and personal rituals rooted in French-Celtic heritage, this project reimagines forgotten spaces of feminine power, resistance, and healing.

Each piece embodies a symbolic gesture of reclamation: We will keep watching you presents wood logs marked with cyanotype feminine eyes — a silent, collective gaze from trees and forrest. We will keep dancing like the leaves of a tree transforms fragile leaves sewn together with veins of red thread into a breathing, merging with the video projection of a woman indefinitly sweeping a dusty floor. The heart of a witch stages a human ceramic heart pierced with nails — like an old ritual of violence and resilience invoquing the power of love and nature. In Dry flowers are to remember the dead, hanging flowers dipped in limestone and blood hover above mirrors resting on beds of salt, creating an altar of memory and mourning. This story only appears when you unveil the darkness invites visitors to illuminate engraved glass drawings — stories only revealed when light meets shadow.

The residency will culminate with a performance, reimagined here as a nocturnal ritual of remembrance. Wearing the head of an owl — the symbol of her grand-mother but also a creature of wisdom, mystery, and silent observation — the artist will read a personal text dedicated to her grandmother. Through her story, she will evoke a generation of women who once held ancestral knowledge — connected to plants, rituals, the land — and who gradually lost this wisdom through time, societal shifts, and capitalist transformations.

Together, these works create a fragile yet defiant landscape — a space haunted by what has been lost, but fiercely alive with what can still be reclaimed.